Thursday, January 15, 2015

In the 1980s, I read an article about some
noted visionaries of the bold future of virtual reality.The visionaries uniformly denied that virtual
sex would be a factor in this brave new technology.Apparently the visionaries hadn't noticed
that several existing technologies were significantly subsidized by sex, among
them the phone companies (by 900 numbers), Big Pharma (by The Pill), and the
new videotape industry (by X-rated sales and rentals).Here in the Twenty-First Century, though
we're still waiting for VR, phone companies enjoy the additional subsidy of
surfers seeking X-rated websites, penile implants and Viagra keep multinational
medical companies big in the stock market, and video stores add X-rated DVDs.

SF authors are bolder, or maybe just less
blind, than the VR visionaries; they routinely incorporate varieties of
cybersex in their fiction.But SF
authors rarely center plot and theme on sex, and the professional and
semiprofessional SF magazines rarely publish speculative sex stories.Yet the enormous sexual changes of the last
few years, both trivial (porn spam) and profound (legalized gay/lesbian
marriage in Canada), demand more SF exploration of the subject.Fortunately, on the small-press margins of
SF, at the border shared with the erotica genre, a few writers are speculating
intelligently and imaginatively about the future of sex.Among the best-known and best of the
erotic-SF writers is M.Christian.

The stories in his new collection, The Bachelor Machine, pass the litmus
tests of both the SF and erotica genres.Take out the tech and there's no story; take out the sex and there's no
story.This description may lead those
unfamiliar with SF erotica to suspect that every story is about getting off
with the aid of futuristic technologies, and that's true as far as it goes.But that's not going nearly far enough.

The stories in The Bachelor Machine are not about sex, though they're stuffed with
sexual acts; the stories are about what sex means.M.Christian is writing about the psychology
of being human, and he often does so by exploring sexual possibilities and
realities that are rarely discussed, even in private conversation.He not only thinks forbidden thoughts, he
extrapolates them in the finest SF fashion.

The aptly named "Technophile"
pushes technofetishism to the ultimate as it explicates an idea most authors
(especially male authors) would never imagine, let alone write about.To put it bluntly, "Technophile"
eroticizes castration.A character has
his penis cut off and replaced with the top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art "Long
Thrust." Another character wants to lose his virginity to the
technological phallus, which he sees as hotter and better than the old-fashion
flesh kind.But the cutting-edge implant
needs a recharge and remains limp throughout the encounter, a bitter irony.

In the decaying post-industrial future of "Winged
Memory", Dusk does something most people couldn't imagine, and would find
horrifying if they did: he sells (and loses) his memory of losing his virginity.He does this to buy thirty minutes with a
prostitute "walking the street, eyes available red." To have her
again, Dusk keeps selling memories, until he doesn't know who he is, or who
this woman is that he inexplicably wants.

The stories "Bluebelle" and "Skin-Effect"
break taboo by making explicit the sexual undercurrents of the savagery and
killing in nearly every Hollywood cop and military action flick.

In "Guernica", several
individuals meet secretly in a basement to enjoy sex acts outlawed by a
repressive Twenty-First-Century government.Their practices, costumes, and toys deliberately, ironically,
terrifyingly recreate the uniforms, actions, and tools of the cops who would
arrest and punish – and kill – them.

In "Butterflie$", a hacker
immersed in the full-sensory, Disney-perfect Glade of the Datasea finds herself
assaulted – literally – by a flock of beautiful butterfly-sprites.I generally hate stories about
rape/violation, yet Christian's skill, imagery, and insight kept me reading to
the end ... and I never felt violated by the story.It's an impressive achievement.

In "Hackwork", Rosselyn Moss
works for ExpressTaxi as a body that cyber-riders hire to carry their
consciousness around New Orleans.They
dictate her actions and, inevitably, drive her body into sexual encounters.One night, she is distressed to find herself
whipping a beautiful young stranger – and even more distressed to discover the
stranger loves it.

Like Rosselyn, the narrator of "Switch"
is a rent girl.She isn't a taxi, but
she may have an even more troubling job, for she never remembers who her
clients were, or what they did to her.M.Christian
travels deep into taboo territory by demonstrating that, for some, being so
thoroughly controlled, so completely owned as to remember nothing, is the
ultimate turn-on.

In "Everything but the Smell of
Lilies", Justine Moor is a whore with a deeply creepy specialty.She's been turned into "a hardwired dead
girl, a chilling and stiffening hooker", dying over and over for money.If this bleeding-edge cyberpunk extrapolation
isn't disturbing enough, Justine finds herself lying, a motionless but
fully-conscious corpse, in an ambulance staffed by a necrophiliac.(In case it's not already abundantly clear,
some stories in The Bachelor Machine
are not intended to arouse.)

Many of M.Christian's grittily urban
stories are cyberpunk; "Heartbreaker" pushes the form to a logical
extreme.When an undercover cop sets up
the bust of an outlaw biohacker, the two women don't just have sex, they
withdraw very special interface cables from inside themselves and connect them:
"Linked, each hardwired into the other's genitals, mixed and matched, they
surged and merged."

In "Thin Dog", fans jack their
minds into a full-sensory experience of what it's like to be superstar
reactor-rock band Thin Dog.Members Johnna,
Paul, Georgina, and Jingo (ahem) play instruments that are nanotech implants
woven through their bodies; playing includes on-"stage" couplings and
quadruplings.

Some stories not only share
1980s-cyberpunk's fascination with Japanese culture, but show the influence of "anime"
(Japanese animation).In many ways, the
woman and situation in "State" are ideal for anime.The prostitute Fields lives in Japan and
earns her living by pretending to be an almost mythically superior Japanese-made
sex android.Her masquerade must always
achieve perfection – from biochemically lowered body temperature, to "incredibly
durable bonding polymer" applied daily to every millimeter of flesh, to
behavior in orgasm – because her clients must never suspect she's human.

Not every story is cyberpunk."The New Motor" is an amusing
steampunk entertainment set in Paul Di Filippo territory.Nineteenth-Century spiritualist John Murray
Spear has a vision of "the Association of Electricizers ... spirits with a
mechanical turn of mind," and begins proselytizing for the creation of "the
Physical Savior of the Race ... the New Motor!" This charismatic messiah
for "a new Age of Man Through Machine" leads his followers to
transcendentalist New England, where they settle in the conservative town of
Lynn, Massachusetts.Seducing and
neglecting a particularly fervent follower proves seer Spear is dangerously
blind to certain human truths.

The collection has some flaws.Some futures don't seem entirely plausible (a
minor problem, and one hardly confined to the erotic-SF subgenre).A couple of stories are vague in their SFnal
elements.I never quite figured out what
"Bluebelle" was (a micro Death Star? a flying fembot? a round mecha?).It takes too long to learn what the
futuristic technology is and does in "Eulogy".The endings of "Eulogy" and "Winged
Memory" left me wondering just what was happening.And frustratingly, the book provides no
copyright data, providing no information about if or when the stories were previously
published.

M.Christian's prose is strong and supple
and sometimes lyrical.If you don't like
naughty language or graphic descriptions of sex, you'd better steer clear of
his work.But if you like smart,
taboo-breaking SF, then read The Bachelor
Machine.

–Cynthia Ward, Locus Online (2004)

(Cynthia Ward has published short fiction
in Asimov's and numerous anthologies,
and has written a monthly market column for Speculations.She has written many reviews for Amazon.com.Her website is at www.cynthiaward.com.)